


Necromancy

by CN7



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Anger, Grief/Mourning, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-06
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-11-12 20:20:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18017780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CN7/pseuds/CN7
Summary: In which Marian Hawke still holds onto unresolved prejudices with certain magical practices.





	Necromancy

Purple has always been her color of choice. Like the soft hues in the sky before dawn on the plains of Fereldan. Lilac the shade of black locusts scattered across Hightown, and the only parts of the district really worth lingering in for no particular reason. The petals Fenris tucked behind her ear. Lavender like the ribbons Mother once tied into her hair and Bethany’s. Cool-toned and bright like the static she directs at a whim.

  
Not this nauseating fuchsia of wisps and pungent incense that pulls the fallen corpses to their feet, and prays they dance to a new fiddlers tune.

  
Marian’s vision hazes over, blinding her to any color at all beyond the world drenched in red mist.

  
Her face flushes and the temperature shift is in no way connected to the beating sun against the desert dunes. The breath she steals in recoil is tainted with dust, blood and ash, and she has rarely ever in her life experienced the sort of unadulterated rage that summons the sparks of lightning and sizzling pops of thunder to her fingertips on instinct alone.

  
The darkness settling in her heart befalls their entire party in a single, dangerous snarl. It is a feral expression upon a face so sleek. As though she could devour the puppet master in a solitary bite, and she stalks around him—predatory and dangerous—like the gatekeeper, her Chasind father once lamented.

  
Jaguar.

  
Guardian of the dead and unknown, Carver whispered one forgotten morning when they’d finally amassed Malcolm’s whisperings of their grandmother’s gods for what they were.  
And guardians are nothing if not keepers of their charges.

  
“You can’t just let the dead lie?” Marian spits so evenly, so darkly even Varric, still catching his breath like the rest of them, jerks nervously and shifts from one foot to another nervously. “You have to warp them to your own purpose?”

  
“Impressive, I know,” Dorian boasts and rests both hands upon his staff and digs the brunt of it casually into the sand.

  
A quake enters her voice and her heart pounds up into her face. “It’s vile.”

  
Dorian looks stunned, taken aback by the sudden, unexpected chagrin from a woman who had only just appeared so tolerant and—in spite of a few jokes—rather modest. “In case your eyes betray you, Champion, those dead Venatori—the people trying to kill us—were indeed fighting for us in the end.”

  
Necromancy is not the same as blood magic, Marian knows. The same stigmas, though still treated with caution in the South, do not sustain their way through Chantry rhetoric, and she is appalled to think it regarded so flippantly, even as a sacred practice amongst her own ancestors. Marian has no doubt in mind of the horror stories involved in blood magic, but at the very least—though not a practice she undertakes herself—it is a magic with practical applications and not one that always asks for a life.

  
Unlike necromancers.

  
Necromancers always require a life.

  
Dorian needed these Venatori.

  
Gascard DuPuis required the women he lied so adamantly about protecting, and poor Emeric . . . .  
Quentin demanded- Quentin stole.

  
A hot, angry breath rattles around in the hollow place Marian's heart should be. Heat expands in her eyes, and utter loathing crackles the dry static in the air around her, makes the clothes stick to her skin like the anger she’s denied for years.

  
“If I gave a damn about who they were before we killed them, I’d have said so,” Marian growls. She takes a dangerous stride forward, encroaching on Dorian’s personal space. “You desecrated their bodies. Gave them new inhabitants who don’t belong here. Isn’t to die once already enough?”

  
“Not for people trying to hand the world over to a god monster.”

  
“No one deserves that.”

  
“They do.”

  
An ear-splitting pop echoes from Marian’s clenched fist, and Dorian flinches in spite of the harsh stare he returns, but there is no light to match the sound.

  
Varric steps forward before the Inquisitor can even move. Though Marian knows she shocks him in irritation, he places a hand firmly on her arm. It is a comfort she does not shy away from no matter how she bristles. He mutters softly in a tone Marian recognizes as the same he once soothed Fenris in, “Come on, Giggles. Sparkler didn’t mean anything by it. He’s just showy. He’d never hurt anyone for fun.”

  
Dorian tilts his head and arrogantly crosses his arms. “Well, I don’t know about—.”

  
A dark look from Varric and the Inquisitor finally silences him.

  
“They’re all the same, Varric,” Marian says.

  
She can hear her lover’s rhetoric in the depths of her soul, in her own words, and never before has she understood him better or been so ashamed to know the power she possesses. Never before has she missed him so.

  
“I know,” comes his gentle response. Varric doesn’t argue or patronize, his response isn’t even pacifying. It’s honest and heartfelt because he knows. He saw the way Mother’s head had—.  
Tears burn her eyes as she reels and marches silently up the dune, Varric’s hand on the small of her waist. The fingers she brushes through her friend’s hair do not zap his skin like before. Instead they hold him tightly against her side on their trudge towards camp because she cannot bear the thought of watching the faces of her remaining family balanced atop bodies that are not their own.

  
Her fury and madness recede, but her resolve remains. “They’re all the same.”


End file.
